Kevin Drum

There's a fundamental truth in Republican politics that I hope will someday stop being true: there's rarely any percentage at all in proclaiming oneself as a moderate.

That's not because there are no self-identified moderate voters in the GOP; as of January of this year, according to Gallup, 24% of GOP voters fall into that category. But the dominant conservative faction in the party just cannot tolerate leaders who don't share The True Faith, so unless one aims at capping one's support at about one in five Republicans, it's a bad idea to Go There.

There's a weird thing about this. Kilgore is right that there's no percentage in proclaiming yourself a moderate. But there is a big percentage in being a moderate. That's because those Gallup numbers are misleading. Sure, 70 percent of Republicans say they're conservative, but that hides a lot of variation. There are tea-party conservatives, social conservatives, and business conservatives. In practice, a fair number of the non-tea partiers are relatively moderate.

My guess remains the same as it was in 2012: Roughly half of GOP voters are effective moderates. That's why Romney won. While the rest of the field competed like starved piranhas for scraps of the True Believer vote, Romney hammed it up as a conservative to protect his flanks, but with enough of a wink and a nod to quietly scoop up most of the moderate vote. And that put him way ahead of everyone else.

Jeb Bush is in the same position this year. The difference is (a) he's a Bush, and (b) he doesn't necessarily have the moderate voters all to himself. There are guys like Kasich who might peel off a bit of it, but more troubling for Bush is that Scott Walker may end up competing for the moderate vote too. So far he's not showing signs of doing it very well, but that could change. If it does, we could easily end up with Bush, Walker, and one of the tea partiers beating each other bloody well into spring.

He added that now, after almost a year of American airstrikes on the group, it is becoming clear that “only a large-scale foreign intervention is likely to roll back and ultimately eliminate the Islamic State.”

....This is mostly because many Sunnis in both countries who live under the group see no viable alternative, especially not in a return to rule by the governments of Syria and Iraq. Sunnis in Iraq remain broadly hostile to the Shiite-controlled central government. As for Syria, President Bashar al-Assad has presided over a civil war that has killed more than 200,000 people and basically dislocated half the population.

In other words, ISIS may be brutal, but at least they're not corrupt. "You can travel from Raqqa to Mosul and no one will dare to stop you even if you carry $1 million," said one resident. "No one would dare to take even one dollar."

Sadly, in the Middle East that counts for a lot. If, in the end, the Shiite troops of Iraq simply don't care enough about the Sunni areas to risk their lives getting it back, and if the Sunnis who live under ISIS actively prefer brutal Sunni rule to the corrupt Shiite rule of Baghdad, then ISIS wins. Unless, of course, we undertake Walt's "large-scale foreign intervention."

And obviously there's only one country that can do that. Right now, everyone thinks the Iran treaty is going to be the big foreign policy issue of next year's election. Maybe. But I think interest will fade after it's a done deal. Instead, ISIS will probably dominate the conversation, and Republicans will have to put up or shut up. If President Obama's limited strategy of training and airstrikes isn't working, are they willing to commit to a large-scale intervention using ground troops? That's likely to be the big foreign policy issue of the election.

Today brings the latest presidential poll from the fine folks at ABC News and the Washington Post. The big news is that Hillary Clinton has maintained her 63-14 percent lead over Bernie Sanders.

Just kidding! I know you don't care about that. You want to know what's going on over in GOP-ville. Your answer is in the chart on the right. Walker and Bush have both gained slightly over the last month, but nearly every other candidate has lost support. And where has that support gone? To Donald Trump, of course. But then there's this:

How long the Trump surge lasts is an open question; this poll was conducted Thursday through Sunday, mostly before his controversial criticism Saturday of Sen. John McCain’s status as a war hero. And Trump’s support was conspicuously lower Sunday than in the three previous days.

In a hypothetical three-way matchup between Clinton, Bush, and Trump, Trump's support was 21 percent from Thursday to Saturday, vs. 13 percent in Sunday interviews.

There's no telling how this plays out. If Trump implodes—and he will eventually, even if his McCain comments don't do the trick—it's likely that his supporters will shift to tea-party conservatives: Huckabee, Cruz, Perry, maybe Rubio, and probably Walker. But not Bush.

Or....well, who knows? ABC News tells us that Trump's support dropped in Sunday interviews, but they don't tell us who that support shifted to. We'll have to wait and see. Maybe Bush will come out of this better than I think.

Seven years after the great banking meltdown of 2008, and five years after the passage of Dodd-Frank, the Fed has finally announced new capital requirements for large, systemically important banks that could devastate the financial system if they failed. These new requirements can be met only with common equity, the safest form of capital, and are in addition to the 7 percent common equity level already required of all banks:

J.P. Morgan would face a capital “surcharge” of 4.5% of its risk-weighted assets under the final rule. The other seven firms must maintain an additional capital buffer of between 1% and 3.5%....The size of each bank’s additional capital requirement is tailored to the firm’s relative riskiness, as measured by a formula created by international regulators and the Fed. A bank’s surcharge can grow or shrink depending on changes such as size, complexity and entanglements with other big firms.

....“A key purpose of the capital surcharge is to require the firms themselves to bear the costs that their failure would impose on others,” Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen said in a written statement prepared for this afternoon’s open meeting. “They must either hold substantially more capital, reducing the likelihood that they will fail, or else they must shrink their systemic footprint, reducing the harm that their failure would do to our financial system.”

Leverage, leverage, leverage. That's the big lesson we should have learned from the Great Meltdown. And the cleanest and easiest way to reduce leverage is to increase capital requirements. This is a good move in the right direction, though it probably doesn't go far enough.

It also applies only to ordinary banks, not to the shadow banking sector—which, in retrospect, appears to have been at least as big a contributor to the financial collapse as conventional banks. But that's a tougher nut to crack. It will probably be a while before we see how the Fed plans to handle that.

As you may have heard already, the Netroots Nation gathering in Phoenix this weekend turned into quite the mess. Already suffering from a boycott for choosing the immigrant-unfriendly state of Arizona for this year's gathering, its session with presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley was taken over completely by protesters from the Black Lives Matter movement. They chanted, they heckled, they came up on the stage, and both Sanders and O'Malley reacted like deer in headlights. David Dayen has a pretty thorough rundown of what happened here.

I won't pretend to know very much about either the movement itself or how Sanders and O'Malley should have responded. But it did get me curious: What exactly are their demands? Luckily they have a convenient website, and if you scroll down a bit you come to a button labeled "Learn About Our Demands." Perfect. So here they are:

We demand an end to all forms of discrimination and the full recognition of our human rights.

We demand an immediate end to police brutality and the murder of Black people and all oppressed people.

We demand full, living wage employment for our people.

We demand decent housing fit for the shelter of human beings and an end to gentrification.

We demand an end to the school to prison pipeline & quality education for all.

We demand freedom from mass incarceration and an end to the prison industrial complex.

We demand a racial justice agenda from the White House that is inclusive of our shared fate as Black men, women, trans and gender-nonconforming people. Not My Brother’s Keeper, but Our Children’s Keeper.

We demand access to affordable healthy food for our neighborhoods.

We demand an aggressive attack against all laws, policies, and entities that disenfranchise any community from expressing themselves at the ballot.

We demand a public education system that teaches the rich history of Black people and celebrates the contributions we have made to this country and the world.

We demand the release of all U.S. political prisoners.

We demand an end to the military industrial complex that incentivizes private corporations to profit off of the death and destruction of Black and Brown communities across the globe.

At the risk of being yet another clueless white guy, I'd be curious to know how this translates into concrete initiatives. In the case of presidential candidates, the options are legislation, executive actions, more active enforcement of existing laws, and the bully pulpit. In the third bullet point, for example, are they literally asking for a full-employment bill? Or something else?

Anyway, I was curious about their specific demands, so I figured others might be too. Now that I've seen them, I'm still curious about how they expect this to play out. The protest at Netroots Nation probably did little except to benefit Hillary Clinton, who didn't attend and therefore couldn't be caught flatfooted. In addition, all of the Democratic candidates are likely to at least give more frequent shout-outs to racial issues over the next few days and weeks.

Does Uber routinely pick up riders in good neighborhoods but avoid those who call in from poor neighborhoods? A new study suggests it doesn't. Mark Kleiman, who played a small role in the study, explains what it found:

The design could hardly have been simpler; we sent pairs of riders to call for taxi service or use an app to summon UberX for travel along pre-planned routes. The riders recorded how long it took....After each ride, the riders switched off; whoever took a taxi last time took an Uber next time. Our riders didn’t know that Uber had paid for the study.

The answer was clear-cut, and consistent across neighborhoods and days: summoning an UberX took less than half as long as calling for a taxi, and the trip cost less than half as much. UberX was also more reliable, with no very long wait times.

Even though Uber had no control over our data analysis or interpretation, the fact that Uber paid for the study makes some skepticism about our results natural and proper. We will happily share our data and methods with other research teams for re-analysis and replication.

It was not possible for a single study in a single city to answer all the relevant questions about ridesharing. Would the same relationship hold in other cities? Would it hold in the small number of very-high-crime neighborhoods we excluded in order to protect our riders? Would it hold after dark?....So this study ought to be the beginning of the scientific effort rather than the end.

This is tentatively good news for Uber. As Mark says, it's a beginning, not the final word in how Uber compares to taxis. They didn't test in high-crime neighborhoods, and obviously Uber's requirement for a smartphone and a credit card automatically precludes the very poor from using their service at all.

Still, an interesting first cut, and it's basically fairly cheap research to carry out. The full report is here.

Oregonians will be able to buy birth control at a pharmacy without a doctor's prescription beginning next year, potentially making the state the first in the nation to allow the practice. The bill was overwhelmingly approved in the state House and Senate and was signed by Gov. Kate Brown last week. It will go into effect at the start of next year.

....A second Oregon law, which passed the 90-member Legislature in a near-unanimous vote Thursday, allows women to obtain a yearlong supply of birth control instead of refilling their prescription every 30 or 90 days.

I know there's some disagreement about this among progressives these days, since prescription birth control is covered by Obamacare and OTC birth control isn't. But I assume Oregonians who want a prescription can still get one, and allowing contraceptives to be sold OTC as well is the right thing to do. That decision should be made solely on safety grounds, not on grounds of political convenience. This is the same argument we make against things like forced ultrasounds for abortion patients, and it's the right one.

The one-year supply is a nice bonus too, based on evidence that women are more likely to use contraceptives regularly if they don't have to make a special trip for a refill every 30 days. All in all, good for Oregon, working hard to retain its spot as one of the sanest states in the Union.

A few days ago the Hallmark Channel decided to present us with a showing of kitten baseball. We recorded it, since you never know when a few minutes of zoning out in front of adorable kittens might be just what you need. But it turned out that Hopper was fascinated. She stared at the kittens on the screen, then moved closer, then jumped up on the cabinet to get an even closer look. Unfortunately, the light was bad and I couldn't get any good pictures.

The next day I tried again in the morning light. But this time Hopper was busy with other feline priorities, while Hilbert, who had sat around like a furry, bored medicine ball the night before, suddenly took over. He couldn't take his eyes off the screen. And that's how you see him today, staring avidly at an orange-and-white kitten on the television. Now that's cat TV.

The Guardian reports today on the latest work of Jack Grieve, a professor of forensic linguistics at Aston University in the UK, aided by research from Diansheng Guo and Alice Kasakoff of the University of South Carolina and Andrea Nini, of Aston University. Their research topic is this: how do people swear in different US states? Only a British newspaper could publish this, since American newspapers would never allow such family-unfriendly swill in their august pages. Hell, I may be stretching things by doing it at Mother Jones.

You can click the link for the full rundown, but you'll be interested to know that "fuckboy" is one of the fastest rising words of 2014. It's apparently popular in the mid-Atlantic region and in California starting just north of where I live—which explains why I've never heard of it.

In any case, here's a sample of Grieve's linguistic maps. On the left are states where "fuck" is especially popular, and on the right are states where "shit" is especially popular. California is clearly a fuck state, which fits with my observations of a lifetime. Of course, you also have some states—mostly in the polite Midwest—that don't use either, and some—mostly the coastal areas from South Carolina up to New Jersey—where they really like them both. Fascinating, no? Certainly more interesting than the old soda-pop-coke chestnut.

Here's the latest from Pluto, a hi-res image of the Sputnik Plain, which should be enough to get Republicans seething. From NASA:

In the latest data from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, a new close-up image of Pluto reveals a vast, craterless plain that appears to be no more than 100 million years old, and is possibly still being shaped by geologic processes. This frozen region is north of Pluto’s icy mountains, in the center-left of the heart feature, informally named “Tombaugh Regio” (Tombaugh Region) after Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto in 1930.

....Scientists have two working theories as to how these segments were formed. The irregular shapes may be the result of the contraction of surface materials, similar to what happens when mud dries. Alternatively, they may be a product of convection, similar to wax rising in a lava lamp. On Pluto, convection would occur within a surface layer of frozen carbon monoxide, methane and nitrogen, driven by the scant warmth of Pluto’s interior.